THE PORCELAIN CIRCA 1770, TWICE MARKED WITH AN UNDERGLAZE BLUE BEEHIVE MARK AND PAINTER'S MARK OF THREE DOTS, THE BASE OF SIMILAR DATE

This Viennese 18th century porcelain clock comes from the renowned collection of the Austrian couple, Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer. The Bloch-Bauers were great patrons of the arts and they owned an extensive collection of Viennese classical porcelain, including a considerable number of rococo porcelain sculptures. A catalogue of the porcelain collection, consisting of about 230 items at the time, was published by Richard Ernst in 1925 as Wiener Porzellan des Klassizismus. Die Sammlung Bloch-Bauer. The Bloch-Bauers owned a castle, Schlos-Jungfer, in Brezan (outside of Prague) and a palais on the Schillerplatz in Vienna. Ferdinand was a very prominent industrialist and longtime President of the "Friends of the Museum" in Austria, a prestigious function in the art world.

Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer kept a 'salon' in their Vienna palais, frequented by politicians, intellectuals and artists. They were best known for their patronage of the artist Gustav Klimt and owned seven of his most important paintings, which were hung as a 'Klimt gallery', in memoriam after Adele's death. Klimt painted two large portraits of Adele, and presumably used her as a model in his famous "Judith and Holofernes" pictures. In addition to assembling their eminent collection of classicistic Viennese porcelain of the Sorgenthal period, they also collected works by most other important Austrian artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Fendi, Ferdinand Georg Waldmueller, Josef Danhauser, and Jakob Schindler. Adele Bloch-Bauer died tragically young in 1925 of meningitis. Ferdinand fled Vienna immediately after the occupation of Austria through Germany in March, 1938, first reaching Brezan, Czechoslovakia and then finding refuge in Zurich, Switzerland where he survived the war years and died in exile in November, 1945.

The Viennese Porcelain Factory was founded as a private enterprise in 1718 by Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, a former official of the Austrian War Council. During its first twenty six-years of operation before being sold to the Austrian Government in 1744, the factory produced traditional Austrian baroque and Chinoiserie wares. Under the new management of the Minister of Finance, the factory began to succeed, and it was at this time that the underglaze blue factory mark was introduced; given its resemblance to a beehive, the Bindenschild, a shield with bands, the historical Austrian heraldic symbol, earned the wares the name 'beehive porcelain'. W. Born believes that the Bindenschild mark probably "indicates that that the objects so marked were first to be at the disposal of the Imperial Court, and afterwards to be sold." This was certainly one of the marketing techniques used by the new management to at once distinguish the wares from those produced at Meissen and give them the royal cachet that would appeal to aristocratic patrons. Highly sculptural rococo figurative groups became a mainstay of the factory's production and a trademark violet glaze was introduced that was still in use in the rococo/neoclassic transitional period when the present clock was made. This clock is perhaps the most richly-decorated group known to survive from these years.

In his article W. Born writes, "the socle of gilt bronze was added later in England, where the clock was for a long time in private hands", but this does not appear to be the case. A similar base in the musée du Louvre used to support a marble sculpture is illustrated in G. Souchal, French Eighteenth-Century Furniture, New York, p. 98, 1961, fig. 70.